Lufthansa and KLM cancel flights and limit sales of cheaper tickets

Two of Europe’s largest airlines took the rare step of restricting sales of all but their most expensive tickets while cancelling another set of flights as the disruption gripping aviation worsened. Lufthansa and KLM put the measures in place to help ease the travel problems caused by staff shortages and the rise in demand for seats since the relaxation of Covid-19 rules. Andrew Charlton, managing director at consultancy Aviation Advocacy, said airlines had long used flexible ticket prices to manage demand and revenue but that it was highly unusual to “blatantly” use it for logistical reasons. It is part of a wider problem as airlines across Europe resort to drastic and sometimes unorthodox measures to try to avert last-minute cancellations and disruption, with the industry selling far more seats than it can comfortably handle this summer. Lufthansa said it had stopped the sale of some low-cost tickets “for a short period of a few days” to allow passengers affected by cancellations to rebook. While the special measures were in place, journeys were priced at a flat rate of E500 per flight, leaving even domestic return trips costing E1,000. The airline said the plan had “worked” and that the restrictions had been lifted by Friday. The Dutch operations of Air France-KLM also said it would “strongly restrict” the sale of remaining tickets for flights to European destinations on KLM and its regional airline KLM Cityhopper. The cheapest London to Amsterdam economy return trip in July on KLM was GBP700 on Friday afternoon, up from about GBP140 last month, according to Google Flights data.<br/>